precipitous haste. In fact the old boy up front who sat next to Dean never took his eyes off the road
and prayed his poor bum prayers, I tell you. .Well,. they said, .we never knew we’d get to Chicaga
sa fast.. As we passed drowsy Illinois towns where the people are so conscious of Chicago gangs
that pass like this in limousines every day, we were a strange sight: all of us unshaven, the driver
barechested, two bums, myself in the back seat, holding on to a strap and my head leaned back on
the cushion looking at the countryside with an imperious eye - just like a new California gang come
to contest the spoils of Chicago, a band of desperados escaped from the prisons of the Utah moon.
When we stopped for Cokes and gas at a small-town station people came out to stare at us but
they never said a word and I think made mental notes of our descriptions and heights in case of
future need. To transact business with the girl who ran the gas-pump Dean merely threw on his T-
shirt like a scarf and was curt and abrupt as usual and got back in the car and off we roared again.
Pretty soon the redness turned purple, the last of the enchanted rivers flashed by, and we saw distant
smokes of Chicago beyond the drive. We had come from Denver to Chicago via Ed Wall’s ranch,
1180 miles, in exactly seventeen hours, not counting the two hours in the ditch and three at the ranch
and two with the police in Newton, Iowa, for a mean average of seventy miles per hour across the
land, with one driver. Which is a kind of crazy record.
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10
Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes
of hobos, some of them sprawled out on the street with their feet on the curb, hundreds of others
milling in the doorways of saloons and alleys. .Wup! wup! look sharp for old Dean Moriarty there,
he may be in Chicago by accident this year.. We let out the hobos on this street and proceeded to
downtown Chicago. Screeching trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, the smell of fried food and beer
in the air, neons winking - .We’re in the big town, Sal! Whooee!. First thing to do was park the
Cadillac in a good dark spot and wash up and dress for the night. Across the street from the YMCA
we found a redbrick alley between buildings, where we stashed the Cadillac with her snout pointed
to the street and ready to go, then followed the college boys up to the Y, where they got a room and
allowed us to use their facilities for an hour. Dean and I shaved and showered, I dropped my wallet
in the hall, Dean found it and was about to sneak it in his shirt when he realized it was ours and was
right disappointed. Then we said good-by to those boys, who were glad they’d made it in one piece,
and took off to eat in a cafeteria. Old brown Chicago with the strange semi-Eastern, semi-Western
types going to work and spitting. Dean stood in the cafeteria rubbing his belly and taking it all in. He
wanted to talk to a strange middle-aged colored woman who had come into the cafeteria with a
story about how she had no money but she had buns with her and would they give her butter. She
came in napping her hips, was turned down, and went out flipping her butt. .Whoo!. said Dean.
.Let’s follow her down the street, let’s take her to the ole Cadillac in the alley. We’ll have a ball..
But we forgot that and headed straight for North Clark Street, after a spin in the Loop, to see the
hootchy-kootchy joints and hear the bop. And what a night it was. .Oh, man,. said Dean to me as
we stood in front of a bar, .dig the street of life, the Chinamen that cut by in Chicago. What a weird
town - wow, and that woman in that window up there, just looking down with her big breasts
hanging from her nightgown, big wide eyes. Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get
there..
.Where we going, man?.
.I don’t know but we gotta go.. Then here came a gang of young bop musicians carrying their
instruments out of cars. They piled right into a saloon and we followed them. They set themselves up
and started blowing. There we were! The leader was a slender, drooping, curly-haired, pursymouthed
tenorman, thin of shoulder, draped loose in a sports shirt, cool in the warm night, self-
indulgence written in his eyes, who picked up his horn and frowned in it and blew cool and complex
and was dainty stamping his foot to catch ideas, and ducked to miss others - and said, .Blow,. very
quietly when the other boys took solos. Then there was Prez, a husky, handsome blond like a
freckled boxer, meticulously wrapped inside his sharkskin plaid suit with the long drape and the
collar falling back and the tie undone for exact sharpness and casualness, sweating and hitching up
his horn and writhing into it, and a tone just like Lester Young himself. .You see, man, Prez has the
technical anxieties of a money-making musician, he’s the only one who’s well dressed, see him grow
worried when he blows a clinker, but the leader, that cool cat, tells him not to worry and just blow
and blow - the mere sound and serious exuberance of the music is all he cares about. He’s an artist.
He’s teaching young Prez the boxer. Now the others dig!!. The third sax was an alto, eighteen-yearold
cool, contemplative young Charlie-Parker-type Negro from high school, with a broadgash
mouth, taller than the rest, grave. He raised his horn and blew into it quietly and thoughtfully and
elicited birdlike phrases and architectural Miles Davis logics. These were the children of the great
bop innovators.
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Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before
him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into
ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything
it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile
and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his
mother’s woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy
days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page
and the rest - Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonious
Monk and madder Gillespie - Charlie Parker in his early days when he was nipped and walked
around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy,
saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal
from his mouth he blew the greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched-out,
his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes
so that he can’t feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool
and easy getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.
Stranger flowers yet - for as the Negro alto mused over everyone’s head with dignity, the young,
tall, slender, blond kid from Curtis Street, Denver, jeans and studded belt, sucked on his mouthpiece
while waiting for the others to finish; and when they did he started, and you had to look around to
see where the solo was coming from, for it came from angelical smiling lips upon the mouthpiece and
it was a soft, sweet, fairy-tale solo on an alto. Lonely as America, a throatpierced sound in the night.
What of the others and all the soundmaking? There was the bass-player, wiry redhead with wild
eyes, jabbing his hips at the fiddle with every driving slap, at hot moments his mouth hanging open
trancelike. .Man, there’s a cat who can really bend his girl!. The sad drummer, like our white
hipster in Frisco Folsom Street, completely goofed, staring into space, chewing gum, wide-eyed,
rocking the neck with Reich kick and complacent ecstasy. The piano - a big husky Italian truck-
driving kid with meaty hands, a burly and thoughtful joy. They played an hour. Nobody was listening.
Old North Clark bums lolled at the bar, whores screeched in anger. Secret Chinamen went by.
Noises of hootchy-kootchy interfered. They went right on. Out on the sidewalk came an apparition a
sixteen-year-old kid with a goatee and a trombone case. Thin as rickets, mad-faced, he wanted to
join this group and blow with them. They knew him and didn’t want to bother with him. He crept into
the bar and surreptitiously undid his trombone and raised it to his lips. No opening. Nobody looked
at him. They finished, packed up, and left for another bar. He wanted to jump, skinny Chicago kid.
He slapped on his dark glasses, raised the trombone to his lips alone in the bar, and went .Baugh!.
Then he rushed out after them. They wouldn’t let him play with them, just like the sandlot football
team in back of the gas tank. .All these guys live with their grandmothers just like Tom Snark and
our Carlo Marx alto,. said Dean. We rushed after the whole gang. They went into Anita O’Day’s
club and there unpacked and played till nine o’clock in the morning. Dean and I were there with
beers.
At intermissions we rushed out in the Cadillac and tried to pick up girls all up and down Chicago.
They were frightened of our big, scarred, prophetic car. In his mad frenzy Dean backed up smack
on hydrants and tittered maniacally. By nine o’clock the car was an utter wreck; the brakes weren’t
working any more; the fenders were stove in; the rods were rattling. Dean couldn’t stop it at red
lights, it kept kicking convulsively over the roadway. It had paid the price of the night. It was a
muddy boot and no longer a shiny limousine. .Wheel. The boys were still blowing at Neets’.
Suddenly Dean stared into the darkness of a corner beyond the bandstand and said, .Sal, God
has arrived..
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I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears
opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own
English summer’s-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable
choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the
piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went
back to his dark corner, old God Shearing, and the boys said, .There ain’t nothin left after that..
But the slender leader frowned. .Let’s blow anyway..
Something would come of it yet. There’s always more, a little further - it never ends. They sought
to find new phrases after Shearing’s explorations; they tried hard. They writhed and twisted and
blew. Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday
be the only tune in the world and would raise men’) souls to joy. They found it, they lost, they
wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned - and Dean sweated at the table and
told them to go, go, go. At nine o’clock in the morning everybody - musicians, girls in slacks,
bartenders, and the one little skinny, unhappy trombonist -staggered out of the club into the great
roar of Chicago day to sleep until the wild bop night again.
Dean and I shuddered in the raggedness. It was now time to return the Cadillac to the owner,
who lived out on Lake Shore Drive in a swank apartment with an enormous garage underneath
managed by oil-scarred Negroes. We drove out there and swung the muddy heap into its berth. The
mechanic did not recognize the Cadillac. We handed the papers over. He scratched his head at the
sight of it. We had to get out fast, We did. We took a bus back to downtown Chicago and that was
that. And we never heard a word from our Chicago baron about the condition of his car, in spite of
the fact that he had our addresses and could have complained.
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11
It was time for us to move on. We took a bus to Detroit, Our money was now running quite low.
We lugged our wretched baggage through the station. By now Dean’s thumb bandage was almost as
black as coal and all unrolled. We were both as miserable-looking as anybody could be after all the
things we’d done. Exhausted, Dean fell asleep in the bus that roared across the state of Michigan. I
took up a conversation with a gorgeous country girl wearing a low-cut cotton blouse that displayed
the beautiful sun-tan on her breast tops. She was dull. She spoke of evenings in the country making
popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad
when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do. .And what else
do you do for fun?. I tried to bring up boy friends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with
emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not
having done what was crying to be done - whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was.
.What do you want out of life?. I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. She didn’t have the
slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother’s for the
summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear something
like the one she wore last Easter, white bonnet, roses, rose pumps, and lavender
gabardine coat. .What do you do on Sunday afternoons?. I asked. She sat on her porch. The boys
went by on bicycles and stopped to chat. She read the funny papers, she reclined on the hammock.
.What do you do on a warm summer’s night?. She sat on the porch, she watched the cars in the
road. She and her mother made popcorn. .What does your father do on a summer’s night?. He
works, he has an all-night shift at the boiler factory, he’s spent his whole life supporting a woman and
her outpoppings and no credit or adoration. .What does your brother do on a summer’s night?. He
rides around on his bicycle, he hangs out in front of the soda fountain. .What is he aching to do?
What are we all aching to do? What do we want?. She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy.
It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and
most lovely, and lost.
And Dean and I, ragged and dirty as if we had lived off locust, stumbled out of the bus in Detroit.
We decided to stay up in all-night movies on Skid Row. It was too cold for parks. Hassel had been
here on Detroit Skid Row, he had dug every shooting gallery and all-night movie and every brawling
bar with his dark eyes many a time. His ghost haunted us. We’d never find him on Times Square
again. We thought maybe by accident Old Dean Moriarty was here too - but he was not. For thirty-
five cents each we went into the beat-up old movie and sat down in the balcony till morning, when
we were shooed downstairs. The people who were in that all-night movie were the end. Beat
Negroes who’d come up from
Alabama to work in car factories on a rumor; old white bums; young longhaired hipsters who’d
reached the end of the road and were drinking wine; whores, ordinary couples, and housewives with
nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in. If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the
beater solid core of dregs couldn’t be better gathered. The picture was Singing Cowboy Eddie Dean
and his gallant white horse Bloop, that was number one; number two double-feature film was George
Raft, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre in a picture about Istanbul. We saw both of these things
six times each during the night. We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them
dreaming, we were permeated completely with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird
dark Myth of the East when morning came. All my actions since then have been dictated
automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience. I heard big Greenstreet sneer
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a hundred times; I heard Peter Lorre make his sinister come-on; I was with George Raft in his
paranoiac fears; I rode and sang with Eddie Dean and shot up the rustlers innumerable times. People
slugged out of bottles and turned around and looked everywhere in the dark theater for something to
do, somebody to talk to. In the head everybody was guiltily quiet, nobody talked. In the gray dawn
that puffed ghostlike about the windows of the theater and hugged its eaves I was sleeping with my
head on the wooden arm of a seat as six attendants of the theater converged with their night’s total of
swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that reached to my nose as I snored head down - till
they almost swept me away too. This was reported to me by Dean, who was watching from ten
seats behind. All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and the gone were swept
up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He would have had
to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found
me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of everybody
concerned and not concerned. What would I have said to him from my rubbish womb? .Don’t
bother me, man, I’m happy where I am. You lost me one night in Detroit in August nineteen forty-
nine. What right have you to come and disturb my reverie in this pukish can?. In 1942 I was the star
in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Cafe on Scollay
Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped
myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and
assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchments on me till I was unrecognizably
caked. What difference does it make after all? - anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in
heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.
Gibberishly Dean and I stumbled out of this horror-hole at dawn and went to find our travel-
bureau car. After spending a good part of the morning in Negro bars and chasing gals and listening to
jazz records on jukeboxes, we struggled five miles in local buses with all our crazy gear and got to
the home of a man who was going to charge us four dollars apiece for the ride to New York. He
was a middle-aged blond fellow with glasses, with a wife and kid and a good home. We waited in
the yard while he got ready. His lovely wife in cotton kitchen dress offered us coffee but we were
too busy talking. By this time Dean was so exhausted and out of his mind that everything he saw
delighted him. He was reaching another pious frenzy. He sweated and sweated. The moment we
were in the new Chrysler and off to New York the poor man realized he had contracted a ride with
two maniacs, but he made the best of it and in fact got used to us just as we passed Briggs Stadium
and talked about next year’s Detroit Tigers.
In the misty night we crossed Toledo and went onward across old Ohio. I realized I was
beginning to cross and re-cross towns in America as though I were a traveling salesman - raggedy
travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying. The man got
tired near Pennsylvania and Dean took the wheel and drove clear the rest of the way to New York,
and we began to hear the Symphony Sid show on the radio with all the latest bop, and now we were
entering the great and final city of America. We got there in early morning. Times Square was being
torn up, for New York never rests. We looked for Hassel automatically as we passed.
In an hour Dean and I were out at my aunt’s new flat in Long Island, and she herself was busily
engaged with painters who were friends of the family, and arguing with them about the price as we
stumbled up the stairs from San Francisco. .Sal,. said my aunt, .Dean can stay here a few days and
after that he has to get out, do you understand me?. The trip was over. Dean and I took a walk that
night among the gas tanks and railroad bridges and fog lamps of Long Island. I remember him
standing under a streetlamp.
.Just as we passed that other lamp I was going to tell you a further thing, Sal, but now I am
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parenthetically continuing with a new thought and by the time we reach the next I’ll return to the
original subject, agreed?. I certainly agreed. We were so used to traveling we had to walk all over
Long Island, but there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean, and we could only go so far. We
clasped hands and agreed to be friends forever.
Not five nights later we went to a party in New York and I saw a girl called Inez and told her I
had a friend with me that she ought to meet sometime. I was drunk and told her he was a cowboy.
.Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet a cowboy..
.Dean?. I yelled across the party - which included Angel Luz Garcia, the poet; Walter Evans;
Victor Villanueva, the Venezuelan poet; Jinny Jones, a former love of mine; Carlo Marx; Gene
Dexter; and innumerable others - .Come over here, man.. Dean came bashfully over. An hour later,
in the drunkenness and chichiness of the party (.It’s in honor of the end of the summer, of course.),
he was kneeling on the floor with his chin on her belly and telling her and promising her everything
and sweating. She was a big, sexy brunette -as Garcia said, .Something straight out of Degas,. and
generally like a beautiful Parisian coquette. In a matter of days they were dickering with Camille in
San Francisco by long distance telephone for the necessary divorce papers so they could get
married. Not only that, but a few months later Camille gave birth to Dean’s second baby, the result
of a few nights’ rapport early in the year. And another matter of months and Inez had a baby. With
one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent, and was
all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever. So we didn’t go to Italy.
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PART FOUR
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1
I came into some money from selling my book. I straightened out my aunt with rent for the rest of
the year. Whenever spring comes to New York I can’t stand the suggestions of the land that come
blowing over the river from New Jersey and I’ve got to go. So I went. For the first time in our lives I
said good-by to Dean in New York and left him there. He worked in a parking lot on Madison and
40th,, As ever he rushed around in his ragged shoes and T-shirt and belly-hanging pants all by
himself, straightening out immense noontime rushes of cars.
When usually I came to visit him at dusk there was nothing to do. He stood in the shack, counting
tickets and rubbing his belly. The radio was always on. .Man, have you dug that mad Marty
Glickman announcing basketball games - up-to-midcourt-bounce-fake-set-shot, swish, two points.
Absolutely the greatest announcer I ever heard.. He was reduced to simple pleasures like these. He
lived with Inez in a cold water flat in the East Eighties. When he came home at night he took off all
his clothes and put on a hip-length Chinese silk jacket and sat in his easy chair to smoke a water pipe
loaded with tea. These were his coming-home pleasures, together with a deck of dirty cards. .Lately
I’ve been concentrating on this deuce of diamonds. Have you noticed where her other hand is? I’ll
bet you can’t tell. Look long and try to see.. He wanted to lend me the deuce of diamonds, which
depicted a tall, mournful fellow and a lascivious, sad whore on a bed trying a position. .Go ahead,
man, I’ve used it many times!. Inez cooked in the kitchen and looked in with a wry smile. Everything
was all right with her. .Dig her? Dig her, man? That’s Inez. See, that’s all she does, she pokes her
head in the door and smiles. Oh, I’ve talked with her and we’ve got everything straightened out most
beautifully. We’re going to go and live on a farm in Pennsylvania this summer - station wagon for me
to cut back to New York for kicks, nice big house, and have a lot of kids in the next few years.
Ahem! Harrumph! Egad!. He leaped out of the chair and put on a Willie Jackson record, .Gator
Tail.. He stood before it, socking his palms and rocking and pumping his knees to the beat. .Whoo!
That sonumbitch! First time I heard him I thought he’d die the next night, but he’s still alive..
This was exactly what he had been doing with Camille in Frisco on the other side of the continent.
The same battered trunk stuck out from under the bed, ready to fly. Inez called up Camille on the
phone repeatedly and had long talks with her; they even talked about his joint, or so Dean claimed.
They exchanged letters about Dean’s eccentricities. Of course he had to send Camille part of his pay
every month for support or he’d wind up in the workhouse for six months. To make up lost money
he pulled tricks in the lot, a change artist of the first order. I saw him wish a well-to-do man Merry
Christmas so volubly a five-spot in change for twenty was never missed. We went out and spent it in
Birdland, the bop joint. Lester Young was on the stand, eternity on his huge eyelids.
One night we talked on the corner of 47th Street and Madison at three in the morning. .Well, Sal,
damn, I wish you weren’t going, I really do, it’ll be my first time in New York without my old
buddy.. And he said, .New York, I stop over in it, Frisco’s my hometown. All the time I’ve been
here I haven’t had any girl but Inez - this only happens to me in New York! Damn! But the mere
thought of crossing that awful continent again -Sal, we haven’t talked straight in a long time.. In
New York we were always jumping around frantically with crowds of friends at drunken parties. It
somehow didn’t seem to fit Dean. He looked more like himself huddling in the cold, misty spray of
the rain on empty Madison Avenue at night. .Inez loves me; she’s told me and promised me I can do
anything I want and there’ll be a minimum of trouble. You see, man, you get older and troubles pile
up. Someday you and me’ll be coming down an alley together at sundown and looking in the cans to
see..
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.You mean we’ll end up old bums?.
.Why not, man? Of course we will if we want to, and all that. There’s no harm ending that way.
You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others, including politicians and the
rich, and nobody bothers you and you cut along and make it your own way.. I agreed with him. He
was reaching his Tao decisions in the simplest direct way. .What’s your road, man? - holyboy road,
madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.
Where body how?. We nodded in the rain. .Sheeit, and you’ve got to look out for your boy. He
ain’t a man ‘less he’s a jumpin man - do what the doctor say. I’ll tell you. Sal, straight, no matter
where I live, my trunk’s always sticking out from under the bed, I’m ready to leave or get thrown
out. I’ve decided to leave everything out of my hands. You’ve seen me try and break my ass to
make it and you know that it doesn’t matter and we know time - how to slow it up and walk and dig
and just old-fashioned spade kicks, what other kicks are there? We know.. We sighed in the rain. It
was falling all up and down the Hudson Valley that night. The great world piers of the sea-wide river
were drenched in it, old steamboat landings at Poughkeepsie were drenched in it, old Split Rock
Pond of sources was drenched in it, Vanderwhacker Mount was drenched in it.
.So,. said Dean, .I’m cutting along in my life as it leads me. You know I recently wrote my old
man in jail in Seattle -I got the first letter in years from him the other day..
.Did you?.
.Yass, yass. He said he wants to see the ‘babby’ spelt with two b’s when he can get to Frisco. I
found a thirteen-a-month cold water pad on East Fortieth; if I can send him the money he’ll come
and live in New York - if he gets here. I never told you much about my sister but you know I have a
sweet little kid sister; I’d like to get her to come and live with me too..
.Where is she?.
.Well, that’s just it, I don’t know - he’s going to try to find her, the old man, but you know what
he’ll really do..
.So he went to Seattle?.
.And straight to messy jail..
.Where was he?.
.Texas, Texas - so you see, man, my soul, the state of things, my position - you notice I get
quieter..
.Yes, that’s true.. Dean had grown quiet in New York. He wanted to talk. We were freezing to
death in the cold rain. We made a date to meet at my aunt’s house before I left.
He came the following Sunday afternoon. I had a television set. We played one ballgame on the
TV, another on the radio, and kept switching to a third and kept track of all that was happening
every moment. .Remember, Sal, Hodges is on second in Brooklyn so while the relief pitcher is
coming in for the Phillies we’ll switch to Giants-Boston and at the same time notice there Di Maggio
has three balls count and the pitcher is fiddling with the resin bag, so we quickly find out what
